Finance Minister Jim Flaherty boldly went Monday where no finance minister has ever gone before when it comes to the billions upon billions Ottawa transfers every year to the provinces for health and social services.

He told the provinces they would continue to get the billions upon billions from the federal treasury and — here comes the bold bit — told them they could spend it however they saw fit.

Imagine that: A federal government program with no strings attached.

Still, provincial finance ministers are a tough act to please.

“I view this is as a slap in the face,” snapped Manitoba Finance Minister Stan Struthers. “This is not fair.

“It’s un-Canadian.”

Struthers argues that Flaherty’s arbitrary decision will result in a Canada with provinces that do not offer comparable services at comparable taxation levels.

Struthers has a point if he can explain how a 15% sales tax in Halifax is “comparable” with no sales tax in Alberta. Until then, it seems our federation is fairly flexible on what “comparable services and taxation” is all about.

As a result, Flaherty decreed on Monday that five years from now, the rate of increase in health transfers — now 6% a year — will slow to no less than 3% a year but probably hover around 4%.

Flaherty is still going to hear it from the likes of Struthers and his counterparts in Ontario and Quebec.

But despite the carping from the country’s eastern Canadian finance ministers, Flaherty has given them more than adequate warning of new funding arrangements that will be offered on still generous terms.

Nonetheless, the effect of this new deal, as B.C. finance minister Kevin Falcon immediately divined, is to force each province to figure out how to spend its health dollars more wisely.

It is imperative that provinces get started on that work because as David Dodge and Richard Dion — two pretty smart guys who were, respectively, the governor and an economist at the Bank of Canada — laid out in a gloomy report on health-care spending they published earlier this year, the demand for health-care services is ramping up.

Not only is our population aging and, therefore, at the stage in life where more health care is required but we are, as a population, living longer and getting wealthier.

That means we will seek out more health care for a longer period of time.

For Dodge and Dion, the math is inescapable: Health-care spending will simply gobble up more and more provincial government resources and that means something will have to give.

Here’s Dodge and Dion again: “Some combination of increased taxes, reduced public services other than health care, increased individual spending on current publicly insured services, or a degradation of publicly insured health-care standards — longer queues, services of poorer quality — is necessary to manage the growth in health-care spending.

“None of these options is appealing; Canadians have no easy way to manage the chronic health-care spending rise.”

Flaherty, it seems to me, would agree with that assessment.

But his bold deal on Monday is also the federal government’s firm declaration that it will be up to each province to face up to those unappealing options.

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